Well-formed outcomes in NLP are goals that will be done with a lot of preparation and end in mind to ensure that all requirements are provided and consequences are examined before the start.

A clergy escaped from his church after a scandal broke out in which it appeared that he had an affair with a women 20 years ago. A short affair resulted into the pregnancy of the woman and the birth of a boy which was concealed for a long time. The clergy had to pay expenses of the child and the woman for a long time and when after 20 years it was exposed he had to escape and disappear.

It has happened that many of us planned and invested a lot of time and energy to achieve a goal which was not a well-formed outcome as it has been developed by NLP. At the end, we either achieved a goal partially or there were some unintended consequences that marred the whole thing. You work hard to give a presentation to achieve a very specific outcome, but at the end everything turns against you. the United States of America occupied Iraq in order to establish a model modern democracy in the Middle East, however things turned differently and unintended consequences turned that good intention into a destructive war.

When you think of such experiences, you realise the great importance of a well formed outcome in NLP. To avoid such destructive consequences, the developers of NLP decided to define a goal quite differently. The way they defined and processed it, was called well-formed-outcomes. The objective of this process is to avoid conflicts and contrasts that may happen during the implementation or after it has been achieved. These destructive consequences may be personal, ethical, social, political or economic. The cost of setting a goal without taking it through the process of an NLP well-formed outcome is high. This is the reason that most of things that we do create a sense of frustration.

NLP suggests that you look at the end when you start an action or project. You need also to look at various aspects of the goal and how it affects yourself, your family, your colleagues, rules and regulations, traditions and values, and resources.

An executive invited me to train his board members. I was very much surprised at the scale and level of preparations he conducted before starting any project. Amazingly he succeeded nearly in all his projects. If you gave him a puzzle to solve, he would think for some time before starting and configure the whole puzzle from the beginning to the end. Once he had a very good understanding of the puzzle and how it was, resolving it became very easy. I realised that during his preparation phase, he used the process of the well-formed outcome as it has been developed by NLP although he had never studied NLP. He naturally came to this process and he used it in his decision-making.

NLP actually is modelling the successful behaviours of successful people. If you study the patterns of behaviours that result in great results you would see some patterns that are usually used by many other people without them being aware. This executive somehow had mastered the art of decision-making and preparations without knowing anything about NLP. Well-formed outcomes have been consciously and unconsciously used by those people that achieved success in an area of life.